Ballots to remain uncounted in MI and Stein blocked in Philly. Guest: Election integrity, law expert Paul Lehto says this proves 'only option is to get it right on Election Night'. Also: Trump taps climate denier, fossil-fuel tool for EPA...

Yes, like the Energizer Bunny, the case in CA50 (Jacobson v. Bilbray) is still going. The first oral arguments on the appeal took place on Monday.

To recap: the original case was filed last Summer by San Diego voters Gail Jacobson and Lillian Ritt against then-candidate Brian Bilbray and SD County Registrar of Voters/Voter Hater Mikel Haas, after a BRAD BLOG report revealed that pre-programmed, election-ready, hackable-in-60-seconds Diebold voting machines were sent home illegally (in our rarely humble opinion, though one shared in a recent interview by California's new Secretary of State Debra Bowen) with poll workers on overnight "sleepovers" days and weeks before the U.S. House Special Election last July to replace the disgraced Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

There is much more than just the "sleepovers" at question in the case, like the fact that Haas, one of America's worst Elections Officials, arbitrarily and capriciously quoted a legal request by voters for a hand-count in the race at $150,000, effectively stymieing the possibility that such a count would happen at all. Also at issue is the fact that the case was tossed out by a lower court judge after the Bilbray team argued --- with the help of a letter [PDF] from the then-Republican U.S. House Admin Committee in Congress --- that California courts and voters had no say over the issue.

In that letter, the House Admin Committee argued that they, not the California courts or voters, had sole jurisdiction over the case once Bilbray was sworn in. He was sworn in after a fax was sent claiming he was the winner of the election, from the very partisan and now-former CA SoS Bruce McPherson's deputy, Susan Lapsley. Lapsley sent the fax just days after the election, despite the controversy that had erupted over the effectively-decertified voting systems used in the race, the slim reported margin between the two candidates, and the fact that the state hadn't yet actually certified the race, in which tens of thousands of votes in San Diego county had yet to be counted at the time.

Attorney Paul Lehto, working with Carlsbad attorney Ken Simpkins, filed both the original case and the appeal. UPDATE: We've now got a number of accounts of the argument from folks in the courtroom on Monday.

First, Simpkins sends us the following update (which is shorter than our recap) from the first day of hearings last Monday in the appellate case...

Oral argument went very well. Paul was as passionate and as articulate as ever. The defense arguments were flat and uninspired. The court was interested and one judge commented, "It's an interesting case." Such comments are rare. The spectators were divided in the gallery by sides. The side for us was virtually fully. The side for them had one person sitting in it: Mikel Haas.

It could be anywhere from days to months before a written decision is released.

Two of the judges, one of whom is known locally as a staunch Republican, tried to divert attention away from the issues by bringing up the distractions of whether or not the request for a recount had been paid for, and whether or not a recount would change the outcome of the election. Paul handled both diversions well, pointing out that the jurisdictional issue is created upon filing the request for a recount, and that the costs cited by the Registrar at the time, eight times what previous recounts had cost, appeared to be a deliberate attempt to prevent a recount, and that the issue was not whether a recount would change the outcome of an election, but whether the court has jurisdiction to order a recount, or whether Congress, by swearing in a member, can nullify an election and take it out of the hands of the voters.
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Paul explained clearly that if Congress wants to alter State elections procedures, according to the Constitution they have to do it by enacting a law, and that the swearing in ceremony is not a law and cannot change State elections procedures.
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The issue is not, as the defense (and apparently some of the judges) would have it, solely a question of who won and who lost an election. Notwithstanding who won or lost, we the people have the right to know that our State elections procedures were carried out in accordance with law, that any voting machines used were properly certified, and that they functioned properly and did not flip votes from one candidate to another, "lose" thousands of votes, or malfunction in any of the myriad of other ways that have been documented all over the country.

If the court agrees with the plaintiffs, the case would likely be sent back to be heard on the original merits, which were never tried in the case since the original Judge agreed with the Republican U.S. House at the time, ruling that California voters had no legal right to verify the accuracy of their own elections.

In the wake of the Busby/Bilbray matter and subsequent horrendous elections administration by the now-lonely Haas, folks from both the Right and the Left have called for his resignation.

Oh, and about that very partisan McPherson deputy, Susan Lapsley --- the one who dashed off that fax to encourage the U.S. House to swear in Bilbray just seven days after the election, and a full 16 days before it would be certified by the state: she has now been effectively replaced in the new Bowen administration by election integrity watchdog, attorney Lowell Finley.

Keep hope alive.

UPDATE:Kpete over at DU has more details on the oral arguments made Monday as does Mark E. Smith at OpEdNews. Both were in the courtroom during the arguments. I've added a few of Smith's excellent observation to the original article above.

I know there are protocols for how things get done in elections. And I agree there needs to be a protocol, a law even. But the problem here is we have people in high offices who change the law to obfuscate and deny the will of the people. If the will of the people is not to be followed, and the peoples constitutional rights are denied, then what is left?

How many millionaires or common folks are going to sell off their home, or drain money from their accounts to get a vote recount? Let's not even get into how even the recount is flawed when dealing with electronics, there's no paper to recount, so what the people will get charged $150 k to do a recount that can't be done!
This has got to stop.

So what we have is a flawed protocol. Meanwhile, there are people in high office who exploit this flaw to get more power and more high offices.

This is a nasty situation. People are scared. I am scared. I don't even know what the constitution says anymore! If our government is corrupt, and not following it's own laws, why should ANYONE ELSE follow ANY LAW BY THAT GOVERNMENT?

Top this off with a extra helping of domestic spying and you have scared citizens with no rights who are too scared to speak out or take action. Hell, they could be disappeared and tortured.

I bet less that 1% of the population even bothers to contact congress. Even less speak out publically. Not everyone wants to be thrown in jail like Cindy Shehan. Not everyone wants to put their life on hold to fight in a court for more than a year. So they just shut down, and shut up. They let corruption continue down this path to hell we are on. They incrementally loose more and more civil rights.

The media is a place that this can be changed. 99% of the media is not on our side. 99% of the media is a corporate voice piece of crap. You can't even listen to an elected (sic) official on corporate news (sic) live without a god damned voice-over. What is that? Let us hear the damn elected official what they have to say, not your god damn voice-over. There only a handfull of exceptions. I would like to argue that this handfull of exceptions are actualy at a national security risk; they are a target if you want to shut of their voice. If all you want to do to control all of the media, you pass laws to prosecute journalists who report things, you buy out their frequencies, their equipment, their networks, you pass laws to control the flow of information on the web. If nobody can tell you the truth anymore, then you are as good as dead.

This is a national security problem. But normal people don't have control of national security, they can join the military, but that's not national security. People can file lawsuits, but that's not national security.

I think we've lost the United States Of America personally. I don't see it coming back. Will I keep throwing stones publically? Yes. But how much longer until I disapear? Then YOU disapear. Then they re-write history.

Wake up! Take action. Do SOMETHING. I don't know what to tell you to do. PICK SOMETHING. Call your senators.
Create a new protocol. Freeway blog, Protest (but avoid the orange plastic fences) don't *just vote*, that already has a bad protocol. It shouldn't be this hard to count our votes, there are reasons for this.

First, thank you for continuing the fight, so shameful that kerry couldn't do the same.

Recounts should be completed at no cost to tax payers when integrity is at hand. Shame on California's government. Why hasn't that ass arnold gotten involved? Maria please stop sleeping with the moron until he gets rid of those voting machines will you!

We need to shut down business everywhere to stop election fraud and this war and and...I could go on for hours, you all know.
We need to make the immigrant protest look like nothing, then maybe then things will change.

WE MUST ALL BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE A DAY or TWO WITHOUT PAY AND STOP TRADE AND TRAFFIC IN THE US IN EVERY CITY, THEN MAYBE WE'LL BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY! I'M WILLING, HAVE BEEN WILLING SINCE 1999 WHEN THE ASS WON HIS PRIMARY. I'VE ATTENDED MANY BIG PROTEST, BUT WE NEED 'MILLIONS' NOT 300,000 OR SO TO GET THE ATTENTION OF THE MEDIA, AND OUR OWN GOVERNMENT SO ACTIONS CAN FOLLOW.

How the hell has voting not been fixed in 5 years, that's BS....when 'they' want change like the new senior insurance debacle, change was immediate?

Usually, officials who have to be in court manage to bring along a few secretaries or female assistants to keep them company.

I imagine that in this case, Haas probably did ask for an entourage, and an office manager, emboldened by his weakening popularity, had the audacity to ask why they were needed and what their official duties would be, so that their time could be allocated to the appropriate budget line. Receiving no answer, the manager allocated no entourage.